Valerie Harper's Resilience and What Lung Cancer Really Is

Ten years, two diagnoses

Valerie Harper played Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then on Rhoda. CURE reports that she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009.

CURE reports that she lived cancer-free for five years. In 2013 came a second diagnosis: leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, meaning the cancer had spread to the membranes around her brain. She was told she had months to live, and CURE reports that targeted therapy kept the disease at bay for years. In a 2015 interview with CURE she said, "I was supposed to be dead in three months, so you don't quiver when it's been two years and two months."

In a message to CURE readers, she urged other patients to "stay fighting and continue on this amazing path of new ideas for treating and conquering cancer."

She died on August 30, 2019, at the age of 80.

Her case is often told as a story about beating the odds. The more useful reading is about what odds actually are, and that is where this page goes.

Why the second diagnosis was still lung cancer

The National Cancer Institute sets out the naming rule that confuses almost everyone: "Metastatic cancer has the same name as the primary cancer. For example, breast cancer that spreads to the lung is called metastatic breast cancer, not lung cancer."

Cancer that starts in the lung and reaches the brain lining is not brain cancer. It is lung cancer in a new place, and it is treated with lung cancer drugs chosen for that cancer's biology.

NCI divides lung cancer into two main groups, non-small cell and small cell. Non-small cell is the larger group. NCI's clinician guidance names its three main subtypes and gives each as a share of all lung cancers: adenocarcinoma at 40 percent, squamous cell carcinoma at 25 percent, and large cell carcinoma at 10 percent.

What leptomeningeal carcinomatosis actually is

The meninges are the membranes that surround the brain. Leptomeningeal carcinomatosis means cancer cells have spread to them from a cancer that started somewhere else, in her case the lung.

Nothing more about her treatment is public, and this page does not guess at it.

The number she was given, and what such numbers mean

Harper said she was told she had about three months. Survival figures like that are usually medians. A median is the midpoint of a group, which means half of that group lived longer, some of them far longer. A median is not a countdown clock issued to an individual. It cannot be, because it is calculated from people who were treated in past years with the tools available then.

Harper lived about six years past that second diagnosis. That does not make the statistic wrong, and it does not mean anyone else should expect the same. It means the statistic describes a distribution, and people live at every point along it.

When to get checked

NCI says to check with your doctor if you have:

• Chest discomfort or pain
• A cough that doesn't go away or gets worse over time
• Trouble breathing or wheezing
• Blood in mucus coughed up from the lungs
• Hoarseness
• Loss of appetite, weight loss for no known reason, or fatigue
• Trouble swallowing
• Swelling in the face or in the veins of the neck

These signs can have other causes. Call your care team about any of them. If you have a cancer history, tell your care team about any new symptom rather than waiting for the next scheduled visit. If you cough up a lot of blood, have severe trouble breathing, have a seizure, or have sudden confusion or weakness, call 911 or go to an emergency room.

Who should get lung cancer screening

Screening finds cancer before symptoms appear. CDC states the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation: a yearly low dose CT scan for people aged 50 to 80 with a 20 pack year or greater smoking history who smoke now or quit within the past 15 years. A pack year is an average of one pack a day for one year.

NCI reports the benefit and the cost side by side. Yearly low dose CT for three years found more early lung cancer than chest x-rays and reduced lung cancer deaths in current and former heavy smokers. It also produced false alarms leading to unneeded procedures, some overdiagnosis, and repeated radiation exposure.

Screening criteria are built around smoking history. They do not cover people who never smoked, so for them symptoms are the main reason to get checked.

The testing that changed this disease

Modern lung cancer treatment starts with the tumor's genetics. NCI reports that EGFR variants "strongly predict the improved response rate and progression free survival of patients who take EGFR inhibitors." ALK gene fusions appear in 3 to 7 percent of non-small cell lung cancers and respond to ALK inhibitors. NCI lists further targets including BRAF, ROS1, RET, NTRK, MET, KRAS, and HER2. Immunotherapy, which NCI describes as treatment that "helps a person's immune system fight cancer," adds another route.

Note the exact wording on EGFR. It says response rate and progression-free survival, which measure whether and for how long a tumor is held in check. That is not the same claim as living longer overall, and the difference is worth holding onto when reading any drug headline.

What the population figures say

SEER, the federal cancer surveillance program, reports five-year relative survival for lung and bronchus cancer at 65.5 percent for localized disease. It is 38.2 percent when regional lymph nodes are involved, and 10.5 percent once it has spread to distant sites, drawn from cases diagnosed in 2016 through 2022. SEER records 51 percent of cases as already distant at diagnosis and 24 percent as localized. For 2026, American Cancer Society projections reprinted by SEER give 229,410 new cases and 124,990 deaths.

Every one of those figures is a group average. None of them was ever about one person.

Sources

• https://www.curetoday.com/view/remembering-the-life-and-legacy-of-valerie-harper
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/metastatic-cancer
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/lung/hp/non-small-cell-lung-treatment-pdq
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/lung/patient/non-small-cell-lung-treatment-pdq
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/lung/patient/lung-screening-pdq
• https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/lungb.html
• https://www.cdc.gov/lung-cancer/screening/index.html